The Day After Ragnarok

The Ebony Skull Part Four

he hath borne me on his back a thousand times;

11

JUN/48

A face-to-face with Morrisey!

The Major is able to arrange a quick meeting. Apparently Edwin Morrisey is back in Texas and throwing a big shindig. The Major was able to sneak the group’s name onto the invite. Outside of Cordelia, everyone feels uncomfortable at this party. It is a lavish event: dress-up tuxedos and ball-gowns, dancing, food and lots of talking and mingling.

There is only one opportunity to confront Morrisey and the group seizes the moment. It is an interesting conversation to say the least. He won’t give anything away beyond patronizing remarks and veiled threats (“Son, back where I come from, someone like you could get shot by someone like me for saying something like that”), but the group does succeed in making him mad, he lets slip that “the second flood is coming on the solstice” and that “you’ll all be swept away while I sail to safety.” He then storms off, leaving them to puzzle over his comments. Whatever his meaning, he named the same date as was indicated on the star chart of the sealed chamber in the mine.

Breaking the Ark!

Now that they have seen the burial chamber map (the small island), the heroes will need to make preparations for an arctic exploration. When the heroes track down the coordinates indicated on the map in the island tomb, they will find an abandoned city of unimaginable antiquity sealed up just beneath the ice, but it is completely dead and empty, whatever residents who once lived here have long since deserted it, taking everything with them.

The group investigates and discover that Morrisey’s goons have been here, at least a week past. They cut their way through the ice to get into the city, and then brought heavy machinery down to the lowest level, where they burrowed through a stone wall to extract something large and heavy, about the size of a Studebaker. Whatever was sealed in that vault, the walls around it are adorned with murals depicting scenes of destruction on an epic scale. These are clearly warnings about the object formerly contained within, and enough of the strange language is understood now to decipher the strange writing to understand that what was sealed in here was a weapon capable of destroying a city as a primary effect and possibly causing massive earthquakes as a secondary effect. The only way to stop it, according to the inscriptions, is to ‘burn the source stone until it is black.’ No explanation is given as to what the source stone might be.

The goons did a good job of packing their litter out with them, but the heroes find one very critical item that they left behind: a match book with the name, logo, and street number for the Albatross and Kettle.

The Professor recognizes that as a bar in South America, in a small town outside of Cumana, Venezuela.